The Word on the Sign

Words to Know

Evangelical — from the Greek euangelion, good news. It is the word a movement chose for itself. In the Bibles you were given, it is usually translated gospel.

The Bebbington quadrilateral — the four marks that historians, including evangelical historians, most often use to define the movement: the Bible as final authority, the cross at the center, the need for a personal conversion, and the duty to spread the message. It is named for the British historian David Bebbington, who set it out in 1989.¹

Inerrancy — the teaching that the Bible, in its original manuscripts, contains no error of any kind.²

The sinner’s prayer — a short prayer, said once, in which a person admits sin and asks me into their heart. Many churches treat it as the moment a person is saved.

Start with the word on the sign.

Somewhere near you there is a church with evangelical on its sign, or in its statement of faith, or in the name of the association it belongs to. The people inside chose that word on purpose. It means good news. They named themselves after my message.

So it is fair to ask what I meant by it.

I did not leave you a definition in a creed. I left it in what I said the first time I stood up in my own town. I opened the scroll of Isaiah and read: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to deliver those who are crushed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18–19).

Good news to the poor. Release to the captives. The acceptable year, which every listener in that room knew meant the year debts were cancelled and land went back to the families who had lost it.

The earliest account of me sums up my preaching in one line: the Good News of God’s Kingdom, and the call that went with it, Repent, and believe in the Good News (Mark 1:14–15). The good news was a kingdom. It was coming to earth. It would turn the order of things over. Believing it meant changing how you lived.

You should also know that the word was not a church word when I used it. In the Roman world, good news was what an empire announced: a victory, an emperor’s birthday, a new ruler on the throne. A stone set up in a city in Asia a few years before I was born calls the birthday of the emperor Augustus the beginning of good news for the world.³ When my followers called my message good news, they were using the empire’s own word, on purpose, for a different king and a different kind of kingdom.

Now hold that next to the four things the movement that carries the word says it is built on.

I am not going to tell you that the people in that church are bad people. Most of them are kind. Many of them feed more hungry people in a year than their critics do in a lifetime. The question is not whether they are sincere. The question is whether the four pillars they built on are the ones I set down. Let me take them one at a time, and let me use only my own words to do it, the ones printed in red in many of your Bibles.

The First Pillar: The Book

You were taught that the Bible is the final word. I never taught that about any book.

Inerrancy, in the form you were given, is not old. It was set out in its modern shape by two Princeton professors, Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Warfield, in an article titled Inspiration in 1881. They placed the perfect, error-free Bible in the original manuscripts, which no one has seen for over a thousand years.⁴ In October 1978, more than two hundred evangelical leaders met in Chicago and signed a statement making that the line between faithful and unfaithful.⁵

That is eighteen and a half centuries after me.

Here is how I actually used scripture. I loved it. I quoted it constantly. I said I had not come to destroy the law or the prophets (Matthew 5:17). And then I did what every teacher in my tradition did: I argued about what it meant, and I put some of it above the rest.

When I was asked which commandment was the greatest, I did not say all of them equally. I named two, love of God and love of neighbor (Mark 12:28–31), and I said that the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments (Matthew 22:40). Everything else hangs from those two. Anything read in a way that breaks those two has been read wrong.

When men used the Sabbath law to stop a healing or to shame my hungry friends for picking grain, I did not defend every letter of it. I said: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). The rule serves the person. It never goes the other way.

Six times in one sermon I said, You have heard that it was said, and then, But I tell you (Matthew 5:21–22 is the first). I was not throwing out the scripture. I was showing you how to read it: toward mercy, toward the heart, toward the neighbor.

I sent the religious experts of my day back to their own scriptures with one line from Hosea, and told them to go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13). That was the key to the whole book, and I handed it to you.

And there is a sentence in the Gospel of John, written late, by a community remembering me in its own words, that puts the warning as plainly as anything: You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life … Yet you will not come to me, that you may have life (John 5:39–40).

The life is not in the book. The book points.

When the book itself becomes the thing that cannot be questioned, two things happen. The first is that whoever controls the reading controls the people. The second is that the parts of the book that are hardest to live, the parts about money and enemies and the poor, get explained away by the same experts who insist that every other line is literal.

You can watch that happen in print. The most influential study Bible in American evangelical history, the Scofield Reference Bible, put a note on my Sermon on the Mount. The note says that in its primary application that sermon gives neither the privilege nor the duty of the Church. Those, it says, are found in the Epistles.⁶

Read that again slowly. The book that calls every word of the Bible perfect told millions of readers that my longest sermon, the one with love your enemies in it, was not addressed to them.

That is not a high view of scripture. That is a high view of a system, with my words moved to the back.

The Second Pillar: The Moment

You were taught that you are saved in a moment, by a prayer. Nobody I met was ever asked to pray one.

Look for it. Read all four accounts of my life from the first page to the last. You will not find me asking anyone to repeat a prayer after me, or to ask me into their heart, or to raise a hand while every head is bowed.

The altar call and the sinner’s prayer have a history, and evangelical scholars have written it down. The first recorded public invitation was in Massachusetts in 1741. Methodist camp meetings made it routine in the early 1800s. The earliest printed sinner’s prayer that historians have found is from 1922. It spread widely only after the Second World War, through the crusades of Billy Graham and the tract called The Four Spiritual Laws. A pastor reviewing that history for an evangelical ministry says plainly that it was not a major form of evangelism until about 1960.⁷

Sixty-odd years. That is younger than many of the people who prayed it.

Here is what I said when people actually asked me how to have eternal life. Twice in the gospels a man asks me that exact question.

The first was a lawyer. I asked him what the law said. He answered with love of God and love of neighbor. I told him, You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live (Luke 10:25–28). Do this. Then I told him a story about a Samaritan, a man his people despised, who stopped on the road for a stranger, so he would know exactly what doing it looks like.

The second was a rich man who ran up and knelt in front of me. I listed the commandments about how you treat other people. He said he had kept them. And then, the account says, I looked at him and loved him, and I told him the one thing he lacked: Go, sell whatever you have, and give to the poor … and come, follow me (Mark 10:17–22). He went away sad. He was very rich.

Neither man was asked to believe a set of facts about me. Both were told to do something, and one of them was told to do something that cost him everything.

Now watch the one man in the gospels who I said was saved that day. His name was Zacchaeus, a tax collector, a man who got rich working for Rome. He did not pray. He stood up and said he would give half of his goods to the poor and pay back four times over anyone he had cheated. And I said, Today, salvation has come to this house (Luke 19:8–9). Salvation arrived when the money moved.

I also said this, with no story around it: Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (Matthew 7:21). And I asked a crowd a question I am still asking: Why do you call me, “Lord, Lord,” and don’t do the things which I say? (Luke 6:46).

A movement that tells people they are safe forever because of something they said once has built its door in the place I said there was no door.

The Third Pillar: The Payment

You were taught that the center of my story is a payment. I forgave people before I ever went near a cross.

I want to be careful here, because my death matters, and I said things about it. I said that the Son of Man came to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45), and I meant myself. I broke bread with my friends the night before and told them to remember me. My death was real and it was not an accident.

But the specific explanation you were given, that God’s anger had to be satisfied, that someone had to be punished in your place before God could forgive you, is a theory. It was built a thousand years after me and sharpened in the Reformation. It is not something I taught.⁸

Here is what I did. A paralyzed man was let down through a roof in front of me, and before anything else I said, Son, your sins are forgiven you (Mark 2:5). No sacrifice. No payment. Just forgiven, on the spot, by me, with God’s authority, and the experts in the room were furious that I would do it for free.

And the story I told about God’s forgiveness has no payment in it at all. A son takes his inheritance early, wastes it, and comes home to beg for a job. While he was still far off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him (Luke 15:20). The son starts his speech. The father does not let him finish. He calls for the best robe and a ring (Luke 15:22). Nobody is punished so that the father can afford to forgive. He was watching the road.

The one condition I ever put on God’s forgiveness was not a belief. It was your own forgiveness of other people. I put it in the prayer I taught you: Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12). And I explained it right after, in case anyone missed it: If you don’t forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 6:15).

Test the payment theory against that. If the bill is already paid, my condition makes no sense. If my condition stands, the bill was never the point.

The Fourth Pillar: The Mission

You were taught that the great work is to bring people in. I had a sharp word for that, too.

Evangelicals mean well by their activism. They give money, they knock on doors, they go overseas. A good deal of that work feeds and heals people, and I am glad of it.

But notice what the activism is usually aimed at. The goal is a decision. The measure is a number: how many came forward, how many prayed, how many were baptized.

I said something about that kind of work. I said it to religious teachers of my own people, in an argument inside my own tradition, and you should not hear it as a sentence about Jews. It is a sentence about what happens to any religion when recruiting becomes the point: you travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves (Matthew 23:15).

In the same breath I named what they had skipped: the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith (Matthew 23:23).

Even the sentence evangelicals call the Great Commission says what I wanted spread. Not a decision, not a doctrine about me. I said to make disciples, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you (Matthew 28:20). Observe. All things. The things I commanded.

And when I described the day the nations are sorted, I told you exactly what the questions would be. Were they hungry, and did you feed them? Thirsty, and did you give them a drink? A stranger, and did you take them in? Naked, sick, in prison (Matthew 25:35–36)? Then I told you who those people were: because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:40).

No one in that scene is asked what they believed about me. Not one. Both groups are surprised.

What Is Missing

Now put the four pillars side by side and look for what is not on the list.

The Book. The Payment. The Moment. The Mission.

Where are the poor? I said Blessed are you who are poor, God’s Kingdom is yours (Luke 6:20), and a few breaths later, woe to you who are rich! For you have received your consolation (Luke 6:24).

Where is money? I said You can’t serve both God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24), and I talked about money more than I talked about almost anything else.

Where are enemies? I said love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you (Matthew 5:44).

Where is power? I watched how rulers lord it over the people under them, and I said to my friends, But it shall not be so among you (Mark 10:42–43).

Where is judgment of other people? I said Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged (Matthew 7:1), and I told a story about a man of religion who thanked God he was not like that tax collector over there, and I said it was the tax collector who went home right with God (Luke 18:10–14).

None of these is a minor note. They are the bulk of what I said. A definition of my good news that can be stated in full without any of them is a definition of something else.

That is the hard part to hear, so let me say it as gently as it can be said. The movement is not wrong because it loves me too much. It is wrong because it has made me the object of a belief instead of the teacher of a life. You can believe everything on that list and still walk past every person I told you to stop for. I knew that. It is why I ended my longest sermon the way I did: Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man, who built his house on a rock (Matthew 7:24).

Hears, and does. That was always the whole of it.

What You’ll Hear Back

If you show this to someone you love, they will have answers ready. They were given them, the same way you were. Here are the six you will hear most, and what is underneath each one.

They are good answers to bring. They are not good enough to keep.

“Jesus said he is the only way.”

They mean this: I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me (John 14:6).

Start with where it comes from. It is in the Gospel of John, the last of the four to be written, around sixty years after I died. The three earlier accounts give my teaching in short sayings and stories. John gives it in long speeches that sound like the rest of John’s book, and most scholars recognize that John’s community is speaking through those speeches in its own words.⁹ I am not telling you to throw John out. I am telling you not to build a gate out of one sentence from the latest book, and then use it to shut out everything I said in the earlier three.

Then read it as it stands. The way. A way is something you walk on. It was the first name my followers had: before anyone called them Christians, they were people of the Way (Acts 9:2). And John’s own gospel tells you what walking it looks like. The night before I died, in that same long conversation, I said: If you love me, keep my commandments (John 14:15). And I told them how anyone would recognize them: By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:35).

Not by what they believed about me. By love. That is John’s own answer.

“John 3:16. Whoever believes in him.”

This verse is printed on more signs, shirts and stadium banners than any other. Here is something many people who hold up those signs have never been told. The Greek manuscripts have no quotation marks. Every translator has to decide where my words stop and the writer’s comments begin. The NIV, the Bible many evangelical churches read from, decided in its 2011 edition that my words end at verse 15. In that Bible, John 3:16 is not something I said. It is the writer explaining me.¹⁰

Either way, read five verses further, to where that passage ends: But he who does the truth comes to the light (John 3:21). Does the truth. The word believe in that passage is the same word for trusting someone with your life, the way you trust a doctor or a ship. It was never a box to check.

“We are saved by grace through faith, not by works.”

They mean this: for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works (Ephesians 2:8–9).

Notice first that it is not my sentence. It is a letter written in Paul’s name, and many scholars doubt he wrote it. Notice second that they always stop one verse early. The very next line says: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works (Ephesians 2:10).

Then look at what Paul meant by works. When Paul writes, in letters no one doubts are his, that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law (Romans 3:28), the works of the law were the things that marked a man as Jewish: circumcision, the food laws, the holy days. His fight was over whether a Greek had to become a Jew to sit at the table. Since 1977 a large part of the scholarly world has read him that way, and one of its best-known voices, N. T. Wright, comes from inside the evangelical world.¹¹ Paul was not arguing that kindness doesn’t count. In the same letters he says God will pay back to everyone according to their works (Romans 2:6). He says the thing that matters is faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). He says the whole law is fulfilled in one word, and the word is You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Galatians 5:14).

So the apostle they quote against me agrees with me.

And the phrase they built a whole tradition on, faith alone, appears in the Bible exactly once. It is in the letter of James, my brother. It says the opposite: by works, a man is justified, and not only by faith (James 2:24). Martin Luther knew it. In 1522 he called James’s letter an epistle of straw, and he added the word alone to Romans 3:28 in his German Bible, where Paul had not written it.¹²

“Real faith produces good works. They’re the fruit, not the root.”

This is the best answer they have, and it gives the whole thing away.

I agree that you know a tree by its fruit. I said it: By their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:16). So let us use their own test. If the fruit is the proof, then the fruit is the thing that is checked. And in the one scene where I described the checking, the fruit is all I checked (Matthew 25:31–46). Hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, prison.

Now compare that with what you were promised. Many churches tell a person, the moment the prayer is finished, that they are saved and can never lose it. The fruit is optional. If the fruit is optional, it is not the proof. If it is the proof, then the prayer is not.

They cannot have both. Ask them which one they mean.

“You’re just picking the red letters and ignoring the rest of the Bible.”

The movement named itself after my good news. It is fair to ask that my words count.

And look at who actually did the ignoring. It was not the person who read my sermon and tried to live it. It was the study Bible that told millions of readers my sermon was not for them, and sent them to the letters instead. Reading the rest of the Bible is a good thing. Using the rest of the Bible to cancel the part I said is not reading it. It is ranking it, and putting me last.

“If you can’t trust every word, you can’t trust any of it.”

This is the fear underneath all the others, so answer it gently.

By their own statement, the perfect Bible is the original manuscripts. Not one of them survives. The Chicago Statement says so itself.² So by the rule they hold, the Bible in their hands is not the inerrant one either. Nobody alive has ever held that book. Their faith has never actually rested on it. It has rested on something else the whole time.

I told you what to build on, and it was not a theory about lost manuscripts. It was Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine, and does them (Matthew 7:24). A house built that way does not fall down when someone finds a copying error. A house built on every word or nothing falls down the first time a teenager reads two gospels side by side. You have probably watched it happen to someone. That is not a strong foundation. It is a brittle one, and the people who poured it should have known.

If You Were Raised in It

You did not choose the frame you were handed. You were a child, or you were hurting, or someone you loved brought you in, and the people who taught you believed every word. Nothing here asks you to be ashamed of that, or to hate them.

It only asks you to do what I asked of the lawyer: go back and read it yourself. How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). Read my own words without the notes, without the system, without the man at the front telling you which parts are for later. Read them as if they were meant for you, because they were.

If what you find there does not match what you were told, you are allowed to notice. Noticing is not losing your faith. It may be the first time you have met me.

Check It Yourself

Read Luke 4:16–21 and Mark 1:14–15. Write down, in one sentence, what the good news is in those two passages.

Read Luke 10:25–37 and Mark 10:17–22. Both men ask how to inherit eternal life. Write down what each one is told to do.

Read Luke 19:1–10. Find the exact moment salvation is announced, and what happened just before it.

Read Matthew 25:31–46. Count how many of the questions are about belief.

Look up the Scofield note on Matthew 5 (it is free online). Then read Matthew 5–7 straight through and decide for yourself who it is addressed to.

Read Ephesians 2:8–10, all three verses. Then read James 2:14–26.

Open an NIV to John 3 and find where the quotation marks close.

The Short Version

• Evangelical means good news, and the good news I preached was a kingdom, good news to the poor (Luke 4:18).
• The four pillars historians use to define the movement are the Book, the Payment, the Moment and the Mission.
• Inerrancy in its modern form dates from 1881, and the Chicago Statement from 1978. I read scripture through love of God and neighbor, and said the rule serves the person.
• The sinner’s prayer was first printed in 1922 and spread after the Second World War. When I was asked how to have eternal life, I said Do this.
• I forgave without payment, and the one condition I set on God’s forgiveness was your forgiveness of others.
• The judgment scene I described asks no questions about belief. It asks about the hungry, the stranger and the prisoner.
• The poor, money, enemies, power and judging others, the bulk of what I taught, are on none of the four pillars.
• John 14:6 is from the latest gospel, and the same conversation says keep my commandments. The NIV ends my words before John 3:16.
• Ephesians 2:10 says we were made for good works. Paul’s works of the law meant circumcision and food laws, not kindness. The only time the Bible says faith only, it says not by faith only (James 2:24).
• If good works are the proof, they are what gets checked, and the fruit is all I checked.
• The inerrant original manuscripts do not exist. Nobody’s faith has ever rested on them.